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DISCOURSE IX.

ON THE THEORY OF WIT.

THE subject which I have selected for consideration this evening can scarcely be regarded as inappropriate to the present time. In the strenuous endeavours which, in this age of reading, are continually made to produce works of popular entertainment, no quarter of the intellectual world is neglected. The activity of literary enterprise, after expatiating largely in the regions of fancy and fiction, seems to have turned with new ardour to the fields of wit and humour. We are beset on every side with volumes of facetiousness and magazines of drollery. The merry tones of Theodore Hook and Thomas Hood yet linger on the ear, while Sam Slick shakes both sides of the Atlantic, and Punch disturbs the gravity of the world.

Our ancestors loved a jest well enough, as we see in the dramas of Shakespear and his contemporaries. Even Lord Bacon, who was himself highly endowed with the faculty of wit, did not think it beneath him to make a collection of remarkable sayings (put together apparently with great zest),

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and tells us that Julius Cæsar and Macrobius, " consular man," did the same. Since then we have had a brilliant succession of witty writers in Butler, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Congreve, Chesterfield, Walpole and Sheridan, with countless others; but it would be difficult to find a period indulging so lavishly as our own times, in every kind and degree of the gay, the pungent, and the sparkling.

Some of our agreeable artists in this line assail the public with drollery in every form of verse, prose, and picture. They teach you the Latin grammar in a shower of puns, show you the day of the month in a flash of merriment, and illuminate the dismal vistas of history with all the variegated lights of facetiousness.

It has been objected, indeed, that this indulgence in the laughable is carried too far; that the matter, being overdone, degenerates into a melancholy affair; that the wearied sense of the ludicrous is brought to a ghastly smile. What eye (it is asked) can long endure a rapid succession of flashes? What mind does not tire of repeated shocks of surprise?

Wit and humour, it must be allowed, may be sometimes out of place, and sometimes carried to excess. This, however, is a liability which they share with other excellent things, and cannot be brought as a specific objection against them, although it may be against the works in which they appear. Enjoyment of every kind must, must, of course,

have intermissions; and the more exquisite the pleasure, the more is a suspension required. We sicken at perpetual lusciousness: we loathe the unvarying atmosphere of a scented room, although "all Arabia breathes" from its recesses. "The breath of flowers," as Bacon beautifully observes, "is far sweeter in the air, when it comes and goes like the warbling of music, than in the hand." Even the rich illustrations which fancy scatters over the page of the orator or the poet, may be crowded on each other too fast. In eloquence, in fiction, in poetry, in every work intended to yield high and permanent pleasure, the body of the work must undoubtedly be something solid, something addressed to good sense or earnest feeling. The figurative decorations must appear no more than elegant foliage, or beautiful convolutions, surmounting the steadfast columns of thought and sentiment. Poets of mere imaginative power, however dazzling, who have not possessed considerable strength of intellect, have never been able to keep a high place in public estimation. For a while we are pleased to rise above the earth, and wing our way through the atmosphere of fancy; but we soon grow weary of an excursion which is all flight. In defiance of Bishop Berkeley, we must have a world of solid matter to alight and repose on.

Something of the same kind may be said of wit and humour. They have their times and seasons

and appropriate places, and have need to be intermixed with less exciting qualities. Most effective when they take their turn with other good things, with simple narrative or pathos or reflection, it may be affirmed of them, as of the achievements of fancy, that their best specimens have a groundwork of good sense and substantial thought. And, after all, we need to be under no great apprehension of being satiated with facetiousness, since works of this class, in common with the dullest productions of the human mind, may be taken up and laid down at pleasure. You have always relief in your own power. Should you happen to meet with a connected tissue of wit in which almost every word is a sparkling point, -a piece of prose or rhyme in which one jest hands you over to another, and that to a third, and so on through the whole composition without pause or respite, till you feel insufferably dazzled by the incessant coruscations, you have only to put the work aside, and retreat to the ready shade of your own thoughts.

The want of relief would be doubtless a defect in it as a work of art; but, if the lustre were genuine, the turns really happy, and the flashes brilliant, you would have small cause to complain, or rather, you might think yourself fortunate in being able to recreate your mind so delightfully at will.

One thing is manifest even from this little discussion, that wit and humour make a considerable

figure in the world, and, like all other powers that exercise an influence on human affairs and contribute to human enjoyment, deserve to be investigated with closeness and accuracy.

Of these two qualities, which are usually treated together, I purpose, in my present discourse, to confine myself as far as practicable to the former, for the simple reason, that it will of itself furnish amply sufficient matter to occupy the time and attention of my audience.

"What wit is," says a celebrated author, "it may not be easy to define; but it is surely easy to determine that it is a quality immediately agreeable to others, and communicating, on its first appearance, a lively joy and satisfaction to every one who has any comprehension of it. The most profound metaphysics indeed (he continues) might be employed in explaining the various kinds and species of wit; and many classes of it, which are now received on the sole authority of taste and sentiment, might perhaps be resolved into more general principles."

The task which is so well marked out in this passage from Hume, I am now partially at least venturing to attempt.

Of the quality which is to form the subject of our inquiry, numerous definitions have been given*;

* Some account of the various acceptations in which the term wit has been employed, appears in Discourse III. of the present volume.